Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Chapter 33 Summary

  • Huck finds Tom, who comes to the only reasonably logical conclusion possible when he sees his dead best friend: he's a ghost.
  • They have this lengthy dialogue that goes something like this: "You're a ghost!" "No I'm not!" "Yes you are!" until Tom accepts that his friend is in fact alive.
  • Huck starts to tell him about Jim, but he's worried that Tom, being such an upstanding gentleman, will look down on the fact that he's been helping to steal a slave.
  • But Tom is all, "No worries, I'll help you steal him!" which confuses Huck a bit. Apparently Tom isn't so moral and upstanding after all.
  • They go back to Aunt Sally's and Tom introduces himself as some random stranger. They take him in.
  • Over dinner, he kisses Aunt Sally randomly, which she finds rude and "owdacious" until Tom is all, "Just kidding! I'm your other nephew, Sid Sawyer!"
  • Everyone has a good laugh, and they all go back to dinner.
  • In the ensuing banter, we find out that some con artists have come to town under pretense of putting on a show.
  • It seems some of the townspeople knew about the scam in advance, and now they're setting up to give it to the no-good-fellers.
  • Huck, fearing for the lives of the duke and king lights out to town—but he's too late. The men have been tarred and feathered, so that's that. He remarks that "human beings can be awful cruel to one another" (33.70).
  • On the way back to the farm, he feels guilty about what happened to the conmen. This is something he doesn't understand, since the duke and king were such jerks to begin with.
  • Conscience just bugs you no matter what you do.